Marie, the only black girl in the eighth grade willing to befriend her white classmate Lena, discovers that Lena's father is doing horrible things to her in private.
Tish, a teenager who has been enduring abuse from her adoptive stepfather since she was a small child, finally decides she must do something to stop him.
The youngest of three siblings, fourteen-year-old Anke feels both relieved and neglected that her father abuses her brother and sister but ignores her, but when she catches him with one of her friends, she finally becomes angry enough to take action.
Contains nine personal essays about child abuse and neglect, including stories from those who have been abused by family, boys dealing with clerical abuse, and abused children dealing with issues of their abuse in adulthood.
Provides sixteen articles that offer personal, political, and professional perspectives on both sides of the debate about sexual predators, and includes the subject of abuse by authority figures.
Alex, suffering a bit of a crush on her eighth-grade teacher Simon, becomes confused about what is true when a new girl at Forest Alternative claims Simon has been molesting her and Alex.
After having been sent, at a very young age, from New York to live with her grandmother in Haiti, fourteen-year-old Mardi returns to join her parents and try to shape a new life in Brooklyn.
While living with her sister, fifteen-year-old Jocelyn has trouble with her hateful brother-in-law and runs away to her family's summer cabin, where the unwanted presence of two boys complicates her plan of escape.
In Mallory, New York, as five sisters, aged eleven to seventeen, deal with assorted problems, conflicts, fears, and yearnings, a mysterious middle-aged man watches them, fascinated, deciding which one he likes the best.
Presents a play set in the Bronx in 1964 about a nun, Sister Aloysius, who suspects that Father Flynn has more than a casual interest in the school's first African-American student.
